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Sunday, October 30, 2016

So As Not to Have the Mistake Repeated by Future Generations, Chapter 1

We post the private note of Yoshihiro Inoue here
(with his permission).

As the private note is long, it will be
posted chapter by chapter.

Please read the following.

Chapter 1 Why?

I've been pondering
on countless occasions why I perpetrated a heinous crime after my arrest. In
the final analysis, before joining Aum Shinrikyo, I already had problems.Going back to the
past, it was because I didn't understand what a religion is, it seems to me
that it was because I didn't open my eyes to the meaning of being contradiction with human life. On top of that, my weak point of personality is
to be impatient, to play cool, and to make a quick judgment.

As an event which symbolizes
these problems, I remember when I visited my maternal grandmother who was admitted
to a geriatric hospital. It was just full of old men and old women, and their unspeakably sad-looking eyes followed me around. "It's like a modern Ubasuteyama(mountain where old women are
abandoned) here! Although they had been devoted themselves to children and society,
they are secluded such a place and only waiting to die, I have to do my best
about this." I felt sad and anger.

If I try to
realize my thought at that time, "I have to do my best about such a thing", why people can feel easy to leave their beloved ones admitted to a geriatric
hospital where I thought that the aged were abandoned, I should have opened my
eyes to such human contradiction. But I one-sidedly longed for the utopia which had no contradiction. Looking back now, although it was young man's sense of
justice, it was perilous without knowing the world. I think one reason why I
was attracted to such utopia is because of the discord within my family.

I remember when I
was a kindergarten student, my mother attempted suicide. My mother fell on the
floor of kitchen. "What? Yoshi, come here". My mother swingingly raised her body and beckoned
to me. Although I wanted to fly to bosom of my mother, but I couldn't, I wanted
to run away, but I couldn't. Finally, I heard an ambulance siren, my mother
cried "Please leave me die. Please leave me alone", she was carried into ambulance,
and it ran away leaving me. Since then, I always trembled to think about my mother.

As for my father, I
remember he was behaving violently in my house. If occasionally my mother and I
had a meal with my father, he suddenly shouted and flipped the chabudai over. My
mother screamed and quarreled with my father, and then she retired to the room
on the second floor. My father sustained in the drawing room on the first floor, and
my elder brother immediately went back to his room. Nobody cleaned the room, always
I did, I was excessively sad, I cried alone. But about such my family, I didn't
think to be unhappy. When I was a child, I loved documentaries and I knew that
there were many people who had nothing to eat and suffered in the world. Although my father
didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't do gambling, and was a serious man, when I saw
my father who couldn't take his ease even at home, I began thinking "there is
no happiness in his way of living". When I was in middle school, I
couldn't have ideals what kind of adult I wanted to be. At that time, I learned the idea "deliverance
from the wheel of life" of yoga through Martial
arts that I studied by myself.

Although I couldn't believe in the philosophy of rinne (a belief in
reincarnation), by the fact it was said clearly that world is mutable, I was
moved to think that I met the truth without deception for the first time. Then
I felt that all happiness is chained to mutable suffering without exception,
and I was shocked to think humans were living in so endless sufferings. I was
attracted to emancipate myself from the suffering, and I thought that I found
what I would like to do in life for the first time.

As for the above
itself, I think it was not things to be blamed if I caused no one inconvenience.
I think that my great offense was to be constrained by the word "social
revolution by developing spirituality" of Agonshu I met in searching what emancipation
was by self-study without studying the context. What was said was "the modern
society is full of various problems, if human mental ability stays the same,
humans use modern technology violently and then humans may come to end, by only
developing spirituality, humans can escape from such risk". Aum called this relief
from Armageddon by gods' intention.

Thinking back now,
this was not religion nor thought, but it was an agitation which agitated saying that changes of individuals
were widely used to changes of society, it was an illusion.

But at that time,
I was fifteen years old, and I took it seriously and my passion was flamed up to think I should have done
something. But when I entered Agonshu sect, I found that it lacked the
developing spirituality and I disappointed. But because Asahara suggested the
part, I was interested, I entered Aum when I was sixteen years old, and then I fell
into it.

Is there an answer to sufferings and sadness of human beings? Now, I
realize how hard it is to face sufferings which have no answer. Asahara drew the conclusion
that sufferings were only sufferings, and taught that there were true happiness, emancipation
in another place where there was no suffering, and he called the path truth.
I believed that there was an answer to mutable sufferings in Asahara's
teachings, tried to obtain it, believed that it would be salvation for everyone, and spread his teachings.

At first sight,
Asahara's teaching seems to be the same as emancipation from sufferings of transmigration,
at that time I understood so. However, after my arrest, I was shocked to learn that
what Buddhism originally tries to deliver is not the saving from sufferings
based on simple dualism which divides good and bad.

To be specific, it
seems that religion's essence is to know love which spreads in one's heart for
the first time when humans bear and accept sufferings of various contradictions
which humans create and to raise one's character. I think this was obviously the path to be an adult.

So there is no clear answer to suffering, on the contrary, believing that there is the answer
given by other person, and relying on it were to lose oneself, and it was a trap of religion. Like Asahara's teaching, teaching which rejects human contradictions
can't be said as religion, it was only for losing mind as a human.

At the age of 16 I
fell into the trap of religion. In the sect, it was as if the experiences so
precious to becoming an adult were taken away from me.